Top Searches:

Indra Nooyi steps down as Pepsi CEO

Nooyi, 62, will make way for company insider Ramon Laguarta, a 22-year PepsiCo veteran, but she will remain chairwoman until early 2019, the company said.

| TNN | Aug 6, 2018, 19:56 IST

Highlights

Indra Nooyi, 62, will make way for company insider Ramon Laguarta, a 22-year PepsiCo veteran, but she will remain chairwoman until early 2019, the company said

Joining Pepsico as a young executive, she was promoted to chief financial officer (CFO) in 2001 and was named CEO in 2006

WASHINGTON: Indra Krishnamurthy Nooyi, the Chennai-born, IIM- and Yale-educated executive who raised both the bar and the glass ceiling in a global corporate world dominated by men, is stepping down after 12 years at the helm of beverage and food behemoth PepsiCo.

Nooyi, 62, will make way for company insider Ramon Laguarta, a 22-year PepsiCo veteran, but she will remain chairwoman until early 2019, the company said.

“Leading PepsiCo has truly been the honor of my lifetime, and I’m incredibly proud of all we have done over the past 12 years to advance the interests not only of shareholders, but all our stakeholders in the communities we serve,” said Nooyi. “Growing up in India, I never imagined I’d have the opportunity to lead such an extraordinary company.”

Indeed, her India background and her gender animated both her rise and her profile in an American corporate world where female CEOs account for only about five per cent of the Fortune500 companies. Her departure leaves only 24 women leading Fortune 500 companies. She was frequently voted in various polls as one of the most powerful female executives in the world.

Nooyi was PepsiCo’s first female CEO, and also the first foreign-born CEO, and on both counts she blazed an unprecedented trail after she first joined the company in 1994 as head of strategy after brief stints in consulting firms Booz Allen Hamilton and Boston Consulting Group, and in Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri.

Joining Pepsico as a young executive, Nooyi was promoted to chief financial officer (CFO) in 2001 and was named CEO in 2006, becoming the fifth CEO in the company’s 44-year history at a time female CEOs, much less a brown-skinned foreigner, was unheard of.

During her dozen years at the helm, Nooyi led PepsiCo’s transition from a seller of sugary soft drinks and sodas and fatty foods to a greener more health and environment conscious company even at the risk of hurting its bottomline, although some critics saw her effort as inadequate. Even before she became CEO, she oversaw acquisitions such as the purchase of Quaker Oats in 2001, eventually leading to products such as Quaker Oats Upma, Nutri Idli, Nutri Khichdi etc now seen on Indian shelves.

She reclassified PepsiCo's products into three categories: "fun for you" (such as potato chips and regular soda), "better for you" (diet or low-fat versions of snacks and sodas), and "good for you" (items such as oatmeal). As CEO, she later oversaw acquisition of a 50% stake in U.S. hummus maker Sabra in 2008, formed a joint venture with Saudi Arabian dairy giant Almarai in 2009, and bought Brazilian coconut water company Amacoco. In 2010, she oversaw the $5.4 billion acquisition of Russian dairy and fruit-juice maker Wimm-Bill-Dann.

Such efforts to push the company into healthier, more nutritious products with a more diverse portfolio won her admirers but she was also attacked by critics who felt she was slowing down growth even though under her leadership the company generated total shareholder return of 162 percent, growing its net revenue from $35 billion in 2006 to $63.5 billion in 2017.

“Nobody’s going to remember you for delivering earnings to stockholders; they will remember you for the lasting impact you made on society,’’ she said in a 2009 speech as she pushed PepsiCo into uncharted but healthy areas.

She ramped up R&D spending at the company and sent researchers to India to study ayurvedic medicine and Africa and the Amazon jungles to learn about ancient grains, berries and plants.

Among her critics was the activist investor Nelson Peltz of the Trian Fund Management LP, who dismissed her health and nutrition push as a distraction and accumulated stock in a campaign to split up PepsiCo so shareholder could milk more from the company. Nooyi weathered the storm and continued the journey into healthy areas, acquiring KeVita, a leading makers of Kombucha, a fermented tea drink.

She was also politically outspoken, once creating a stir in a speech to the Columbia business school graduating class by ticking off a critique of the Bush administration (and the United States) with her fingers till only her middle finger remained. Describing the world's five major continents as being like the five fingers on a human hand, she called the middle finger an anchor for the functions of the hand, saying, "What is most crucial to my analogy ... is that each of us in the U.S. - the long middle finger - must be careful that when we extend our arm in either a business or political sense, we take pains to assure we are giving the hand ... not the finger.”

More recently, she was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign, and confessed after her defeat in the election that she found herself having to “answer a lot of questions, from my daughters, from my employees -- they were all in mourning.”

All Comments ()+^ Back to Top

Characters Remaining: 3000

Continue without login

or

Login from existing account

FacebookGoogleEmail

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive. Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.